Last week we were at GDC (San Francisco's Game Developers Conference). As always it was an amazing experience and a great opportunity to say hi to old friends and meet new ones.

It was truly inspiring to see so many innovative, fun, and beautiful indie games that are in production or have been recently released. Talking to other indie mobile developers was a fantastic experience and made it clear that there are many other people going through the same things we are. GDC was a welcomed break that left us refreshed and more passionate than ever to finish Axle and show it to the world.

The current alpha Axle build that we were showing around at GDC was extremely well received by everyone that played it. It was also good to get some more solid play testing at this stage in production. Some of our system iteration has finally paid off, and one or two designs are headed back to the drawing board- because we want to make Axle as good as it can possibly be.

What's New:

As for progress on Axle, we just keep rolling content out!Since you last heard from us we have:

Put together a system to create parallaxing backgrounds so that we can give our worlds some depth. We're currently in the process of painting those and assembling them.

Finished a first draft on some more levels! (You'll see this one a lot in updates, we've got quite a few levels each a part of a unique machine with different obstacles and hazards)

Made revisions moving towards a final draft on our music.

Started testing the build of our game on different mobile devices.

Finished cutscene system implementation

Finished the tutorial

Added more particle effects. Because fire, electricity, and explosions make everything cooler, and easier to see on a small phone screen.

Here is what the vfx for a checkpoint will look like. When you reach a checkpoint, Axle will push until he can get the gears turning and power up the next part of the machine. (We will be doing another art pass on the checkpoint structure itself, and the gears will turn with you, but we wanted to show off the lightning!)

Rewards:

Speaking of rewards - guess what we've ordered!

The rewards have been ordered and are slowly coming in. The only exceptions to this are the Axle Soundtrack, the Axle Art book, and the Axle Background Pack. All of these will feature content from Axle, and since we are still building Axle, to deliver those at this time would make them incomplete. Because we want to put as much content as possible into both the art book, background pack, and soundtrack, we will complete and ship those once we are at a point where we are done adding art and music to the game. Don't worry! You will still get your digital or physical copy, but just a bit later than the rest of your other rewards.

Production Schedule:

Making a game, especially one unique and robust as Axle, takes quite a bit of time and dedication. Unfortunately we are a bit short on the former. Our small team has to be employed full time in order to pay the rent while we finish up Axle, committing everyone to a tight schedule of nights and weekends. We've accomplished an amazing amount in that time, but it does make production take longer than if we were able to devote our full time to only this game.

While production will not be finished in April, we will be working as hard as ever to get you rewards and finish Axle as soon as possible.

We've come up with a pretty exciting schedule of when you can expect to receive content and rewards from us:

First, once we have received them from the various companies which we ordered them from, you will receive the first round of Rewards. These will include everything but the Soundtrack, Art book, Background Pack, and Beta Party.

Second, once we finish polishing one of our levels that we want to see your response to, we will share with you a section of Axle, a small beta, for you to both sample and help us test.

After that we will be moving towards the end of production on Axle. Once we have a complete soundtrack and all the art done, we will put together our background pack, soundtrack, and art book, and ship them to you.

Finally, once we feel we have a well-tested project that will work on your phones, we will ship the Android version of Axle. Digital copies of the game, watts, etc. will be given out at that time.

After the Android release we will be working on user support and moving towardsreleases for other systems like iPhones, Kindle Fire, Windows 8 phones, the Ouya, and so on. We don't have time estimates for these yet, but rest assured we will keep you updated!

Last week we were at GDC (San Francisco's Game Developers Conference). As always it was an amazing experience and a great opportunity to say hi to old friends and meet new ones.

It was truly inspiring to see so many innovative, fun, and beautiful indie games that are in production or have been recently released. Talking to other indie mobile developers was a fantastic experience and made it clear that there are many other people going through the same things we are. GDC was a welcomed break that left us refreshed and more passionate than ever to finish Axle and show it to the world.

The current alpha Axle build that we were showing around at GDC was extremely well received by everyone that played it. It was also good to get some more solid play testing at this stage in production. Some of our system iteration has finally paid off, and one or two designs are headed back to the drawing board- because we want to make Axle as good as it can possibly be.

What's New: As for progress on Axle, we just keep rolling content out!Since you last heard from us we have:

Put together a system to create parallaxing backgrounds so that we can give our worlds some depth. We're currently in the process of painting those and assembling them.

Finished a first draft on some more levels! (You'll see this one a lot in updates, we've got quite a few levels each a part of a unique machine with different obstacles and hazards)

Made revisions moving towards a final draft on our music.

Started testing the build of our game on different mobile devices.

Finished cutscene system implementation

Finished the tutorial

Added more particle effects. Because fire, electricity, and explosions make everything cooler, and easier to see on a small phone screen.

Here is what the vfx for a checkpoint will look like. When you reach a checkpoint, Axle will push until he can get the gears turning and power up the next part of the machine. (We will be doing another art pass on the checkpoint structure itself, and the gears will turn with you, but we wanted to show off the lightning!)

Production Schedule: Making a game, especially one unique and robust as Axle, takes quite a bit of time and dedication. Unfortunately we are a bit short on the former. Our small team has to be employed full time in order to pay the rent while we finish up Axle, committing everyone to a tight schedule of nights and weekends. We've accomplished an amazing amount in that time, but it does make production take longer than if we were able to devote our full time to only this game.

While production will not be finished in April, we will be working as hard as ever to get you rewards and finish Axle as soon as possible.

We've come up with a pretty exciting schedule of when you can expect to receive content and rewards from us:

First, once we have received them from the various companies which we ordered them from, you will receive the first round of Rewards. These will include everything but the Soundtrack, Art book, Background Pack, and Beta Party.

Second, once we finish polishing one of our levels that we want to see your response to, we will share with you a section of Axle, a small beta, for you to both sample and help us test.

After that we will be moving towards the end of production on Axle. Once we have a complete soundtrack and all the art done, we will put together our background pack, soundtrack, and art book, and ship them to you.

Finally, once we feel we have a well-tested project that will work on your phones, we will ship the Android version of Axle. Digital copies of the game, watts, etc. will be given out at that time.

After the Android release we will be working on user support and moving towardsreleases for other systems like iPhones, Kindle Fire, Windows 8 phones, the Ouya, and so on. We don't have time estimates for these yet, but rest assured we will keep you updated!

We could not thank each and every one of you enough for your patience and support. All of you have been amazing so far and it has been incredibly motivating to make Axle as fun and amazing as it can be!

As we said earlier, we will continue to keep you updated with progress, rewards, and anything else we feel would be interesting or useful to you.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please email us at axle@fallstreakstudio.com or visit us on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr.

Hello again Backers and Friends!

In addition to designing and implementing a whole bunch of new levels, the programming and design teams have been hooking up some new features:

We now have a rough draft of our in-game store, which allows you to use the watts you either earn or buy to purchase power-ups, extra lives, and other fun items.

We have some new obstacles and hazards to dodge including electricity that bounces around gears and cogs that disintegrate as you roll across them. The visual effects for these hazards are still in the works, but we'll share some screenshots with you once we have something that looks cool.

There are now first drafts for two new pieces for our soundtrack. We also have first drafts for the sound effects for the first three worlds. And let me say, these first drafts sound amazing.

On top of all that, we have some new gear textures!

We posted this guy from the toyshop levels on our Facebook page a couple weeks ago:

And here is one of the adorably devious little spiked gears from the same world:

Now that we are in a more visual stage of our production, we will be able to share with you more frequent updates to show the new textures, levels, gameplay elements, and anything else that may be fun.

In other news, we recently sent out some backer polls to everyone receiving physical rewards so we can start ordering and preparing them. If you have not responded to your poll yet, please do! The sooner we hear your feedback, the sooner we can order rewards. If you did not get a poll, it might be because you are not receiving physical rewards. If you feel as though you should have received one however, please let us know!

If you have any additional comments or concerns about your rewards, please feel free to send us a message here on Kickstarter, or to E-mail us at axle@fallstreakstudio.com.

As always, thank you for your support, and feel free to contact us through blog comments,Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or E-Mail us at axle@fallstreakstudio.com!

Jessica has been working on the Kickstarter backer rewards. We've got some neat stuff lined up for pins, T-shirts, coasters, stickers, thank you cards, and posters! (Don't worry, the rest of the rewards are up next!)

Liz has been sketching up levels on a giant drawing pad. There are a lot of gears, and a lot of huge pieces of paper floating around our workspace right now.

David has been creating hazards and obstacles for levels. You'll now have electricity, fire, and explosions to dodge!

Bryson has been moving Axle over to Unity. We are now able to add levels to the game much faster. In addition, this move will make it all the easier for us to release Axle on other platforms once we are ready!

Alex has been polishing up our UI (or user interface) as he moves the game into Unity. He's also been taking those humongous pieces of paper covered in level designs and putting them into the game.

Adam is composing some new awesome pieces for our soundtrack. Get excited for more original electroswing!

Billy bringing all our new assets to life with fancy new sound effects.

In addition to keeping a thorough schedule so we can get Axle to you as quickly and efficiently as possible, Lauren has optimized our gear textures and geometry. Producers are awesomely efficient people.

This past month has been very busy for us! We're working hard to put together the reward packages, purchase software, and of course build levels and features for Axle!

We wanted to share with you that Fallstreak Studio is currently up for voting on the Big Reboot, a contest to equip small businesses with technology. The contest theme for this month is "Powering Good", and you can see our entry on how we plan to do just that here!

Currently, much of our funding from the Kickstarter campaign is going to software and hardware, though with your support and votes this contest could help us to get much needed supplies for our growing company!

This past month has been a crazy journey, and we are happy that you were a part of it! We raised $20,357 in 30 days, with the support of 303 backers! Not only did we meet our goal but we went above and beyond it--you guys are amazing! Thank you so much for your support, from your messages, to sharing Axle with your friends, to your donations. Every dollar means a lot, and we could not have gotten where we are without each one of you!

Even though we did not make our $22,000 goal to port Axle to iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire, and Ouya, we still have plans to make Axle multi-platform. Though we cannot release Axle on these platforms at the same time as the Android release around April 2013, we plan on staggering our future releases as we are able to afford them. We did get very close to our $22k goal though, and that does help a lot. What this means is that we are that much closer to affording releases on other platforms, so again, a huge thank you for helping us with a significant step towards this goal!

Just because this Kickstarter campaign is over, does not mean we have forgotten you! We'll be sure to keep you updated on release date information, porting plans, the continuing development of the game, and whatever else we feel is cool enough to share!

We want to keep hearing from you too! Please, always feel free to contact us with your thoughts, concerns, or even just to chat!

We're livestreaming our Axle work jam until 2pm Pacific! Every Saturday we get together and meet about the production and design of Axle, check in on tasks, and get some work done. Today we're sharing that process with you! (Don't worry, we work on Axle every other day as well, Saturday is just our day for meetings!)

Click the link below to see us design levels, create art, and do all the other stuff we do for Axle!

Today, we are hosting an Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit with our development team! We'll be taking questions about the game, behind-the-scenes, or anything else! If you have any questions or want to chat, we'll be online until around 7pm PST!

DeltaAttack also wrote a great article about Axle, calling out some interesting points about our gameplay!

Thanks to your feedback, we have added a $35 Digital Only Reward Tier. In it, you can get Desktop/Phone Backgrounds, Ad-Free Copy of Axle Game, $15 Worth of Watts, a Virtual Thank You Card, Downloadable Soundtrack and the Digital Behind-the-Scenes Art Book.

Thank you everyone for your continuing support as we enter our final week of fundraising! Thanks to you, we have been making progress towards our stretch goal. With your help, we can reach $22,000, and make Axle multi-platform for everyone!